A Marine Tutorial on Media ‘Spin’ [Archive] - Marine Corps

thedrifter

06-24-07, 09:28 AM

Daily Column
US Papers Sunday: Keeping Cool in Baghdad
Eight troops killed; Marines' spin revealed; Progress reports
By CHRIS ALLBRITTON Posted 8 hr. 49 min. ago

The Washington Post goes with a feature and roundup of the news in Iraq today, with no one story dominating. The New York Times rounds out a fuller selection, but like the Post, no major scoops. It does have an eye-opening Week in Review piece on the spin initially offered by the Marines in the case of Haditha, which is currently under investigation.

From the perspective of a journalist in Iraq, today's piece by Paul von Zielbauer will give a sense of vindication. In November 2005, a group of Marines killed 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha after an IED killed one Marine and wounded two others. TIME Magazine's Tim McGirk started investigating and through his reporting got an investigation going. As part of his reporting, he emailed questions to the Second Marine Division in Iraq. Last month, during hearings into the incident, an internal memo hashing out McGirk's questions came to light, revealing a contempt for the press and general defensiveness on the part of the four commanding officers from the Second Marine Division. (Full disclosure: I worked for TIME and with McGirk during his initial investigation in Baghdad, although I didn't work on the Haditha story.) The four officers' responses are exercises in cynicism, including this gem:

McGirk: How many marines were killed and wounded in the I.E.D. attack that morning?

Memo: If it bleeds, it leads. This question is McGirk’s attempt to get good bloody gouge (sic) on the situation. He will most likely use the information he gains from this answer as an attention gainer.

Another question from McGirk, ("Were there any officers?") was initially given a long, five paragraph thrashing out, but ultimately shortened to "No." Questions about how many Marines were involved "in the killings," as McGirk phrased it, are met with scorn and spin: "We will not justify that question with a response. Theme: Legitimate engagement: we will not acknowledge this reporter’s attempt to stain the engagement with the misnomer 'killings.'"

PAPER CHASE
David Sanger and Thom Shanker report for the Times that while Congress has mandated Sept. 15 as the day Gen. David Petraeus' term paper on Iraq is due, there will be other reports landing on Congress' -- and President Bush's -- desks as well. The goal, Sanger and Shanker say, is to "dilute" the expected downbeat tone of Petraeus' report and give Bush "a wide range of options." Pertraeus is expected to ask for more time, despite the deep unpopularity of the Iraq war in Congress and among the American people. Reports from intelligence agencies and an independent commission on Iraqi security forces are expected to give gloomy forecasts, strengthening the factions favoring troop drawdowns. The key point, however, is this: "But with the proliferation of assessments, there may also be a proliferation of contradictory views," the duo write. "That is exactly what the White House sought to create last December, when it ordered other studies to offset the findings of the Iraq Study Group." In other words, with so many reports to choose from, Bush may again defy expectations and do what he wants, forcing Congress to choose whether to cut off funding to troops -- which would be deeply unpopular -- or go along with yet another "Hail Mary" strategy. But even Bush's tactics of stubbornness and water-muddying might have reached the limits of their effectiveness, as IraqSlogger has mentioned. Should Bush ignore calls to draw down troops, the U.S. military will run out of troops to maintain current operations by about April 2008, forcing the U.S. to either withdraw "roughly one brigade a month, or extend the tours of troops now in Iraq and shorten their time back home before redeployment." The latter would be a political time bomb in an election year.

ROOFTOP POOL
The Post's John Ward Anderson tells the story of Amir Rahim and his rooftop pool to report on Iraqis' suffering because of a lack of basic services. Four years after the invasion, it's a cliché to say that Baghdad sucks. But there is still very little electricity, water and other accouterments of modern life. Rahim's entire monthly salary goes to repairing and running generators for his home for 14 hours a day (not including air conditioners.) So Rahim installed a swimming pool on his roof so his family could cool off and get the war out of their minds for a little while, especially in the summer when Baghdad temperatures are kiln-like. Anderson notes that "lofty talk" of government and constitutional reform is meaningless to most people who just want to flick a switch and get some light.

"You talk about sharing oil revenues and constitutional reforms -- why should we care if we don't benefit from it?" he quotes Zainab S. Shakir, an Iraqi official at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Baghdad. "If we want electricity, we need a generator, and we need fuel and we need money. And if you can't get a job, then the insurgents come and pay our kids to work for them."

Anderson gets at the stats and numbers of the story. A U.S. embassy "fact sheet" from May 31 says Baghdad gets an average of eight hours of electricity a day, but Anderson counters with people from various neighborhoods saying they get about two hours. A June 12 study by the National Security Network found that electricity production was still 6 percent below pre-war levels.

But the true gems of the story are the everyday scenes and the rapport between Amir and his wife. "Rahim and his wife sometimes sneak up at night for a private dip after the kids go to sleep," Anderson writes. It's a charming reminder that Iraqis want -- and sometimes get, in Amir's case -- a normal life. At least for a little while.

ROUNDUPS
Anderson and Richard Oppel handle the Post's and the Times' roundup stories, respectively. Saturday's news was grim: Eight U.S. troops were killed yesterday, seven of them in roadside bomb attacks. These massive explosions are causing the bulk of the mayhem, both papers note.

The Post reports 30 U.S. servicemen killed in the past six days, bringing to 78 the number of troops killed in June, an average of 3.5 a day. On Saturday, four soldiers were killed in northwest Baghdad, two were killed in eastern Baghdad, an airman was killed in Tikrit -- all from roadside bombs. Another soldier died from non-combat causes, the military said. A British soldier died from wounds caused by a roadside bombing on Friday near Basra. In all, 153 British troops have been killed in Iraq. Anderson rounds out the day with the news that 12 people were killed and 14 wounded by a sniper attack, a roadside bomb "and other violence." Also, 12 bodies were found in Baghdad, all shot and bearing signs of torture.

Oppel gives a similar rundown in the Times, reporting that 23 have been killed in the last four days. He adds that the planned two-month-long summer break for parliament has been put on hold while the speaker of Parliament Mahmoud Mashadani appears to have dug in his heels and won't leave, although no one really wants him around anymore. The Times has 13 bodies found in Baghdad, news from the increasingly volatile Babel Province, reports of attacks near Kirkuk and reports of three civilians killed in Khalis and three wounded in Abu Sayda, northeast of Baqoubah. Oppel also gives the news from Operation Arrowhead Ripper: 53 al Qaeda fighters had been killed and 60 arrested, according to an Iraqi commander.

In other coverage

NEW YORK TIMES
Frank Rich picks up on Sanger and Shanker's piece and pens another link-filled take-down of Bush Administration spin on Iraq, picking up on the tossing aside of September as a real deadline for success of the surge. "For the Bush White House," Rich writes, "the real definition of victory has become 'anything they can get away with without taking blame for defeat,' said the retired Army Gen. William Odom, a national security official in the Reagan and Carter administrations, when I spoke with him recently. The plan is to run out the Washington clock between now and Jan. 20, 2009, no matter the cost."

WASHINGTON POST
Julia Taft, former director of the Interagency Task Force for Indochinese Refugee Resettlement in the Ford administration, writes an op-ed for today's Post that argues the U.S. needs to do more for the Iraqi refugees displaced by the war. In her former job helping resettle Vietnamese refugees, Taft witnessed the commitment of President Gerald Ford and State Department officials in getting people over bureaucratic barriers rather than blocking them. The she adds this zinger: "The United States has committed to reviewing 7,000 cases and admitting 3,000 refugees by the end of this fiscal year, in September. That is as many as our team processed in a single day back in 1975."

USA TODAY
No Sunday Edition

WALL STREET JOURNAL
No Sunday edition

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
No Sunday edition

Ellie